An Initial Not-Proposal
by KateToast
Summary: Before deciding to NOT do things out of order, Luke and Lorelai make the decision to just do things out of order.


**A/N: **One month prior to my previous story "A Proposal of Sorts," and so much fluff that you may choke.

**XXX**

_March 2008_

"The bus is loading, I should go."

"Wait! You're eating okay?"

"Mom, seriously? I have to go, I can't discuss my eating habits right now."

"It's a mother's right to worry! Are you getting enough vegetables?"

"When has that ever been a pressing concern for us?" Rory asked with a sigh, sounding stressed. The background noise was chatter and a rumbling, running engine.

Lorelai pouted, though her daughter of course couldn't see. "Fine. Where are you headed again?"

"Ohio. All over Ohio." Rory became distracted and Lorelai heard her call, "I'm coming!" Then, back into the phone: "Mom, I've gotta go, otherwise I'll be stranded."

"Okay. I love you, kid. Tell the senator hi from the Hollow!"

"Sure. Talk soon. Bye!"

Lorelai placed the phone back in its cradle, staring at it glumly. She was insanely proud of her daughter, so impressed at the unflagging coverage of Obama's presidential campaign even despite the distance and stress and non-stop travel. She took any and every opportunity to brag about her future Woodward or Bernstein, but dammit, she missed Rory. Seeing her for 32 hours at Thanksgiving and a brief few days at Christmas just didn't cut it for Lorelai, but she wouldn't complain. To Rory, at least.

"How is she?" Luke asked, passing by from the kitchen to the living room.

"Rushed, distracted, important-sounding," Lorelai replied, sulking over to the couch. "I miss her."

Luke set down the two beers and bowl of popcorn he'd been carrying onto the coffee table and plopped onto a cushion. "I know you do."

Lorelai flopped down beside him, spreading out her limbs in her distress. "I miss having her nearby. For almost a year I've had hardly any idea what state she's even in at any given moment."

"She keeps us pretty in the loop about that, though."

"I guess," Lorelai sighed dramatically.

"It's her first big job post-college, and a really impressive one at that. Think of all the opportunities she'll have after this."

"Yeah."

"Plus, she's near the end of it," Luke continued, grabbing a beer, having given variations of this pep talk before. "It's just Obama and Clinton now, so if he drops out Rory's done. And if he doesn't, didn't her editor say they'd probably take her off the road?"

"I guess," Lorelai said again, lifting her legs onto the couch. She snatched her beer as well and took a sip, her lips making a popping noise on the rim in the quiet of the house. "I'm so, so proud of her," she said.

Luke put a hand on her ankle. "Absolutely. We all are."

"She's done such a great job, she stuck with it even when she was miserable and homesick and running on no sleep. And her stories have been good! It's just… amazing, watching her come into her own," Lorelai said. "But sometimes I still wish…"

"Wish what?" Luke prompted, squeezing her ankle.

"That she was a little girl again," Lorelai admitted with an embarrassed smile. "She's spent this past year traveling the country, following a presidential campaign, having all of these grown up experiences on the road, and I know that when she gets home she's going to be different – she's gonna be an _adult_. And as happy and proud and _relieved_ as I am that she's made it this far and done this well, there's still that part of me… that just wants to go back, do it all over again, you know?"

Luke just nodded as Lorelai rambled, listening thoughtfully and drinking his beer.

"I guess lately the more I talk to Rory and hear how put-together and figured-out she's become, I'm realizing that that part of our lives is really over," she concluded.

"No one says everything has to change with you two, now that she's out of school and in the real world," Luke offered.

"No, I know," Lorelai agreed, sending him an appreciative smile as she worked through her thoughts. "I guess what I'm saying is, she isn't a kid anymore."

"She'll always be _your_ kid."

"Yeah, but she's my _adult_ kid," Lorelai explained, and then she waved her hands as if in defeat, beer almost sloshing out of the bottle. "I'm being dramatic."

"Who? _You_?" Luke asked, smirking, which earned him a playful glare.

"Ugh, blame Sookie for this existential rant," Lorelai said.

"What'd Sookie do?"

Lorelai didn't know why she'd tempted fate and said those words thinking that Luke wouldn't ask the obvious follow-up question. Suddenly she felt self-conscious, remembering the conversation in the Dragonfly kitchen days before. "Oh, God, well, you know her – I mean, do we ever know what she's talking about?"

Lorelai's evasiveness seemed to only pique Luke's interest. "Well, what _was_ she talking about?"

Not seeing a way out, Lorelai decided to be brave and just come out with it: "Well, she was complaining about the kids and them making friends and the friends' parents, you know, and how Jackson wants to put Wanda into this intense play group, and she said, maybe not exactly this, but something like, 'Man, if you and Luke had a baby soon _our_ kids could be friends!'" She said it quickly, in a jokey fashion.

Luke didn't say anything. "Kooky Sookie," Lorelai added, chuckling uneasily, trying to gauge his reaction. After another moment, and with the strength of another slug of her beer, Lorelai chose to barrel on: "And I guess talking about the kid stuff made me think about how Rory's grown up and I'm probably not gonna have that again. Dealing with play groups and the parents of your kid's friends."

"Yeah," Luke finally said, leaning forward to put his bottle on the coffee table.

Lorelai watched him. "I've freaked you out with this," she stated.

He scratched his stubbled jaw and looked at her, and she was relieved to find him seemingly calm, almost intrigued. "Do you think about it?" he asked.

"I think about a lot of things," she said loftily, trying to force his hand on what he was getting at.

"Do you think about… kids? _Our_ kids?"

"I mean, I don't know if I think about our _kids_," Lorelai admitted, putting her beer down beside his. She certainly hadn't been expecting to have this conversation now, if ever, but since she'd opened up the rabbit hole she might as well fall down it full-speed. "But maybe once in a while _a_ kid. Singular. That, for hopefully obvious reasons, is ours." She smirked at him. "Now I'm freaking you out."

Luke sat back against the couch, and to her surprise he had a smug look. "Nope," he said.

"Really."

"You aren't," he insisted, shrugging. "If you remember, _I'm_ the one who first brought up the subject of children."

Lorelai frowned. "Yeah, but we exchanged, like, two sentences about it and then never discussed it again. And this was _before_ April had even come around and turned you into Dad of the Year. I remember what you were like with Sookie and Jackson's kids—"

"I know," Luke agreed, raising his palms in a white-flag gesture. "But like you said, that was before April came into my life – _our_ life," he corrected firmly. "And if I'm gonna be honest, I really warmed up to the idea…"

Lorelai raised her eyebrows. "The idea... of…?" she prompted.

"Getting the chance to start from the beginning," he said simply.

Lorelai swallowed. "Oh." Now _she_ was sort of freaked out.

"But Lorelai, you're the only person I'd want to do all that with," Luke told her. "Before we got back together I figured April would be it, and I was fine with that. But since we've fixed things between us – sometimes I've wondered… I don't know. And I couldn't tell if we were on the same page about it or if it was too late, it was behind us or somethin'."

Lorelai wanted to laugh at that. "Luke, this is why we _talk_ about things. To each other," she stressed. They'd been working so hard at communicating.

"I know! But this is – this is a big thing."

"It is," she agreed.

It seemed neither of them knew exactly how to move forward with the subject, so the distantly ticking kitchen clock reigned. Now that Lorelai knew Luke had been thinking about kids, she wanted to rip into it, to share everything they'd both been considering, their fears and hopes of maybe-possibly-perhaps trying to have a baby. Was this what her subconscious had been straining to get at recently?

She turned over what he'd said until words tumbled forth: "You're the only person I'd want to do all that with too. For the record."

Luke smirked. "That's reassuring."

"Seriously," she pushed. "I know this isn't a favorite topic for either of us, but – when I was married to Christopher, he wanted to have a baby."

It was almost instant, the way Luke bristled at the name, the way his mouth became a thin, straight, wary line. It made Lorelai hurry to her point: "But I couldn't go for it, I just couldn't, because it didn't feel right – it _wasn't_ right, any of it." She leaned forward, closer to him, her arm along the couch back, hand just barely brushing his shoulder. "But I think maybe… it could be right, with you. With us."

"Maybe?" Luke asked, still smarting from the mention of Chris.

"I don't _mean_ maybe – well, I _do_ mean maybe, but only because this is a huge decision, Luke. A humongously huge person-sized life-lasting decision." She stared at him. "Well? What do _you_ think?"

"What do I think?"

"Yeah."

Luke took a large breath. Lorelai resisted the urge to badger him for an immediate response. "I think that I'm so glad I have you back in my life, and I think I'm gonna agree to go with whatever you want to do," he said.

"But what would _you_ want to do? Ideally. In a perfect world," she said.

"In a perfect world," Luke repeated, looking at his hands. "In a perfect world we'd have a kid, yeah. Our own kid that looks like you, but likes to run around outside and hates junk food." He smiled at that, lifting his eyes to hers.

Lorelai found a lump in her throat when she chuckled involuntarily. "Well, this kid doesn't sound very fun," she said.

"I guess what I'm saying here, Lorelai, is that if you told me you wanted to try and have a baby… I know this is fruity, but I'd be over the moon about it."

"'Over the moon'," she repeated teasingly, thoughtfully, her insides growing warm. "You sound like George Bailey."

"Seriously," Luke said.

The idea wasn't terrible, having a baby with Luke. In fact, it was the best part. It was other factors that gave Lorelai pause – her age, specifically. Something took hold of her suddenly, as she took in the earnest face of this man, the best friend she wanted with her for the rest of her life. "I think we should try it," she told him, imagining a little blue-eyed baby wearing a baseball cap (not for the first time, she had to admit).

Luke stared at her, his eyes moving across her face, but Lorelai kept a content expression that perfectly reflected how she felt about this decision. "You think we should try it?" he repeated.

"Yes."

"Okay," he said, a smile slowly appearing, and then growing into a grin Lorelai wasn't sure she'd ever seen Luke sport before. "Okay! Wow! Okay." He turned his grin to the coffee table.

"Hopefully the kid doesn't inherit your love of monosyllables," Lorelai joked, though he didn't respond. She knew he was processing but nudged him with her knee, forcing him to meet her gaze. They smiled at each other for a long time in a silly way that made her feel sort of like an idiot, but she felt exhilarated at the same time, excited by this new prospect.

"Does this mean you want to… get married, or somethin'?" Luke asked finally.

Lorelai only considered for a moment. "I'm not in any rush to get married again," she said honestly. "Do… you?"

"I don't need to right this second," Luke said hesitantly. "Maybe, y'know, down the line…"

"I'm not planning on us being apart again," Lorelai told him, words she'd used months ago after they'd reconciled.

"Me either." Luke rested his hand on her leg. "So would you be okay? Doing things out of order?"

Lorelai smirked. "Babe, out of order is what I do best."

"Okay," he said, nodding. "So now we just have to decide when would be best for us to… uh, start."

The big birthday looming just a month away sat heavy on Lorelai's shoulders. "Now," she said simply. Off his startled look, she explained, "I'm turning 40 next month, Luke. Who knows how big a window we have? I think if we're both really committed to this, we shouldn't waste any more time. Besides, we don't want to be those creaky, super-old parents at graduation."

"Try to have a baby starting now."

"_Now_ I've freaked you out. Finally." He didn't say anything else quick enough so she forged on: "Are you regretting having this conversation?"

Luke shook his head, tentative smile starting to emerge. "Not at all."

"So you're down with this," Lorelai asked with a silly, faux-tough inflection, because this was a really heavy, important moment that she needed to lighten immediately or else she'd over-think the decision.

"I'm down with this," Luke agreed, giving her one of his usual _why do you say strange things all the time? _expressions that she loved to wrangle out of him.

"Okay," Lorelai said. "So we're… going to… try to have a baby." Her grin brightened with each word.

"I guess we are," Luke said, and then he leaned towards her and he looked more scruffy and handsome and _hers_ than she'd ever seen before.

She kissed him, hard, but her brain was still working through the implications of this choice, and soon she pulled her mouth from his, much to his frustration. "What are we gonna tell our _existing_ children?" she asked, thinking of Rory on the road and April in New Mexico.

"We don't have to figure that out _right_ this second," Luke protested, pulling her closer and kissing her neck.

Lorelai sighed, partly out of anxiety at breaking the news to their girls, but mostly from pleasure at what Luke was doing to her collarbone. "What about the town?" she asked.

Luke stopped entirely and lifted his head so they were eye-to-eye. "What _about_ the town?"

"What'll we tell them?" Lorelai asked innocently.

Luke rolled his eyes. "Let's leave them out of it for now. I don't want to have a damn town meeting about our private business – _again_."

"Oh, you didn't enjoy that?"

Luke growled in an especially sexy way that made Lorelai forget about the town. They had more important things to do.

**XXX**


End file.
